Hugh Hart

Last month, 21-year-old Blade Olson took the stage of a darkened USC auditorium dressed in a three-piece “Saturday Night Fever”-style suit complete with spread collar. As disco music pounded through the speakers and a crew of disheveled technicians hunched over computers in the wings, Olson tried out a couple of dorky dance moves in front of several dozen video game fanatics, but the real action unfolded on the big overhead screen. There, two fingers performed like legs, sliding, tapping and hopping across the surface of an iPad. The annual GamePipe demo day, hosted by USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering, usually showcases student work modeled on big-budget video games that boast the production values of a Hollywood feature film. But Dance Pad is cheap to make and easy to master. As Olson and his team demonstrated, the virtual dance floor allows […]